When I was in eighth grade, my English teacher decided that our class ought to hold a funeral for "dead verbs." Only years later did I realize that she was actually trying to encourage us to avoid the passive voice in our writing. (In case you were curious, the dead verbs were: am, is, are, was, were, has, have, had—all the conjugations of "to be.)
What is the passive voice? In a passive construction, the subject has something done to it. The subject doesn't actively do anything.
· Passive: The letter was written.
· Active: I wrote the letter.
· Passive: He was murdered by a sinister man.
· Active: A sinister man murdered him.
Usually, you should avoid passive voice as much as possible. It adds excess words and can slow down your prose. Plus, it deprives you of the opportunity to showcase all those juicy verbs that you've picked out for your narrative.
However, there are times when the passive voice is the appropriate way to go.
· When you don't know who or what did something. The man was murdered. (We don't know who committed the murder. We only know that a murder occurred.)
· When you want to place the emphasis on the action rather than on who did the action. The law was enacted in 1998. (We might not care who enacted the law. We just need to know that it was enacted.
· When you want to place the emphasis on the victim rather than the culprit. She was replaced at work. (The attention here is drawn to the person who was replaced, rather than who replaced her or why she was replaced.)
· When you are engaged in formal writing.
· When you think it just sounds better to use the passive voice. (This happens rarely. Or, rather, it should happen rarely.)
I recommend that you take a page or two of your work and try to eliminate the passive voice. Then, read those pages again. Which version do you like better? I'm betting you'll like the active version better.
Oh, and just in case you were wondering, using versions of "to be" doesn't always mean you're using the passive voice. I theorize that my teacher thought most of the students in her class weren't sharp enough to understand what passive voice actually is, so she oversimplified it.
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